Online Multiplayer of Score Rush (free beta)

[Xonatron]

Cagar, all mid-bosses and bosses shake the screen (or rather, any large explosion), so we can't make them all red. Well, we could, but it would be too much red. We appreciate your advice, so please keep it coming.

Rex, have you tried various browsers?

[BareKnuckleRoo]

all mid-bosses and bosses shake the screen

Those white V shaped enemies with relatively little health cause screen shaking on death as well; I wouldn't consider them mid-bosses. There's already guaranteed to be a lot of red onscreen due to P1 being red, P2 being blue, etc. I would actually prefer to see each player color separate from enemy color (so you never see red enemy bullets and red player shots, etc). You can do this already by making every bullet white I guess but that gets a bit bland. Perhaps an option to darken player shots would help?

My issue with screen shaking is that it's still pretty disorienting as it makes it harder to pay attention to the exact position of enemy bullet patterns, something you need to be aware of the moment invulnerability wears off. I've gotten killed a few times because the shaking made it hard to pay attention to whether or not I was in position to squeeze through an incoming gap that arrived just as I became vulnerable. It's certainly an intense mechanic, but I'm not sure if I really like it or not.

Suggestion2: Change explosion-colors to black/white instead of blue/white. Blue player gets unfair disadvantage because his shit will blend to these explosions.

Agreed, the explosions being one specific player color puts that player at a visibility disadvantage, another reason why I distinct player & enemy bullet/explosion colours might be worth doing.

[Xonatron]

I'm not sure which v-shaped enemies you mean, but some mid-bosses come in groups, so I understand why they seem too small to be a mid-boss. In their design they were supposed to be fought all as one, but then each piece is perhaps not worth of a screen shaking explosion. We left it in for consistency.

There's a lot to balance.

Sames goes with the colors. I'll have to revisit how the explosions were done in the Turbulenz/HTML5 version but the explosions should be different colors depending on the color of the enemy destroyed, like the Xbox LIVE version, and not drown out blue. Nevertheless, with only so many rainbow colors, there's bound to be overlap. The intensity of the visuals is a part of the game.

[Rex Cavalier]

Rex, have you tried various browsers?

Yeah, i have tried both of the browsers that i currently have on this PC, none seems to be working.

[Xonatron]

Rex, which browsers? And did you try native HTML5 or the Turbulenz engine? I recommend trying Chrome and the Turbulenz engine. See if that works. HTML5 compatibility in browsers is varying.

[Rex Cavalier]

Downloading and installing engine from dev hub seems to be fixed it, thanks ^_^ .

[Xonatron]

Awesome.

[Captain]

The game seems nice, but how do you actually play in multiplayer?

I see no place where joinable games are listed, I can only create them.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

The interface for that site is kind of crappy. Down at the bottom right of the game screen are a set of blue & white boxes with icons; the one with two people standing side by side opens the Multiplayer pane (and click it again to close it).

[Cagar]

I can't dodge with my left hand, get the arrow controls working. NOW. I LOVE THIS GAME.

[Xonatron]

Hopefully we can get that addressed. I also heard that WAXD (instead of WASD) is a good choice. We could support both as well as the arrow keys. Currently the code base and development with it is in Turbulenz hands (as we are on other projects).

[psoslayer]

was Duality ZF ever released on XBLA/PSN?

[BareKnuckleRoo]

WAXD doesn't sound ideal, X isn't directly below W, it's a bit off-center.

The obvious solution is to support a few preset keyboard controls for default/simplicity and have a fully customizable control option. Nowadays with so many different control options for gaming, this should be a standard.

someone hurry up and help me beat godlike, lolol

[Xonatron]

psoslayer, no it wasn't. Once I return to Xona Games full-time I hope to complete it.

BareknuckleRoo, I thought the same about WAXD until I placed my fingers on them. It feels great! As for customizable controls, we'll have to speak with Turbulenz about that. Perhaps it could be built into their system.

Whenever anyone wants to take on GODLIKE or some of the other leaderboard scores, count me in (if I'm around)!

[SuperSoaker360]

Would it be too much of a hassle to allow players to bind controls themselves?

[Weak Boson]

Had an awesome game with MatthewDoucette earlier. It was only on Normal but it was still loads of fun. I really enjoyed the game when it came out on XBLIG but multiplayer was not an option but I might just be able to get my friends to play this version. Cheers!

[Captain]

Had an awesome game with MatthewDoucette earlier. It was only on Normal but it was still loads of fun. I really enjoyed the game when it came out on XBLIG but multiplayer was not an option but I might just be able to get my friends to play this version. Cheers!

Same.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Just bought this on XBLA to support you; any plans to patch the XBLIG version to have the improvements the browser-based one has?

There also seems to be a music glitch that's present in the XBLIG where the music cuts out/goes really quiet for a split section sometimes during gameplay; happened multiple times over the course of a game with no obvious triggers. Seems like it was fixed when the browser port was made (not that I really care as I play the browser-based version more anyways).

[Xonatron]

BareknuckleRoo,

Thanks so much for your support.

We do have plans to improve the Xbox version, but it will likely only come out during a sequel release now. Some of the improvements are already coded, but the improvements were pushed a bit too far and started to change the game (and thus the scoring) which is something we wanted to avoid. So we were waiting for a sequel to release them. However, once we went to Turbulenz/HTML5, or the browser market, we had to make the game easier with some of these improvements. This is the pitfalls of doing ports, is that the original market can get left behind, and you do not want to get into maintenance type work on all your older ports. However little time it might seem to take, it takes a lot of time and essentially makes no profit. We're not money-focused, but both Jason and I have taken on numerous side projects to stay afloat with Xona Games and without money Xona Games suffers.

Also, the sound glitch I believe is also fixed, but the actual glitch is your sound receiver which is doing "smart" processing and resets itself every time the sound from Score Rush clips out to nothing for a imperceivably short period of time, which happens because there's so many sounds effects happening every 60th of a second, that the sound processing on the Xbox fails to calculate the result and outputs a zeroed signal. Watch any YouTube clip of Score Rush on the Xbox to hear the clipping and how it sounds without a "smart" receiver resetting itself. E.g.: http://youtu.be/QqIAfcLaBq8

You could try turning off your processing on your receiver and seeing if this helps. It's our most unfortunate bug. Receivers should not reset after experiencing only 0.017 seconds of silence, unless in the next 0.017 seconds they can readjust to the signal and output it, which they can't. And when I say "silence" I think it's more than just a zeroed signal, it's actually being output to the receiver from the Xbox as if there is no signal. But I'm no expert on all of this.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

You could try turning off your processing on your receiver and seeing if this helps. It's our most unfortunate bug.

No idea how I'd go about doing that on my TV. Oh well, as long as it's addressed in a sequel/future release I guess. If you do a future release, custom controls would be nice. Actually, I'd like to be able to play this with an Arcade Stick as well as a true twin-stick shmup, so the option to assign firing buttons to XYAB instead of Right Stick would be nice (with RB/LB to bomb, RT/LT slowdown, etc). /greedy

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Okay, having played this enough to feel more confident in actual criticism...

* Custom controls plz. I know, I complained about it before, but I'm sure there's lefthanded people, people without Xbox controllers, or whatever (or when I'm too lazy to go get my controller, lolol)

* Disable some of the graphical effects like Glow by default, or have an obvious note beside the Options screen that says something like "If the game runs slowly, you can turn graphical details off here to speed things up!". I notice a few people commented on the Global Feed about game speed (could easily be network lag on their end of course), but since first impressions are key, I might recommend erring on the side of smooth game speed over glowy bullets (although even with my shit computer I only have real lag in Godlike, I'm impressed!).

* Screen shaking is... actually not that bad. It makes things intense, and it's not as disorienting as I previously thought now that I'm used to it, although I think I might have preferred a softer background ripple effect or something. It's a very cool idea though; instead of Cave games having the occasional large enemy that cancels all on-screen bullets, the screen shaking doesn't reduce the danger as much as encourages you to make aggressive dodges. It's a lot of fun!

* You seem to be on the top layer graphically, but it's still hard to pinpoint your hitbox in a wave of bullets if you're in the bottom corners of the screen over the extra lives or the bomb icons. If possible, could they fade out when you move to the bottom left/right corner? I find I don't use the entire screen and only move just so I'm positioned above the life/bomb icons so I can still easily make out exactly where my hitbox is.

* I'd add an extra 1UP dropper about 2/3rds of the way in the game. Reduce the number of initial lives or something I guess, but because of how the only extends appear early on in the game, if you're playing with someone who happens to eat all the lives and gameovers quickly, it's highly possible that they'll end up spectating most of the match without getting a chance to rejoin near the end of the game, for the last few intense boss fights, where it's really, really fun.. With four players, you get a ton of extends, but it's the only place where you can also give people respawns if someone's gameovered early. Or, on the easiest difficulty levels, do something like an auto-respawn after 30 seconds, that way beginners don't feel like they never get to play to the end of the match. I'm cool with it working the way it does on the highest difficulties though.

* I'd seriously darken the shot color, or add the option to make player shots much darker than the enemy shots. I think it's best when the enemy bullets can be made to really stand out either by making them a colour that's totally seperate from the player's shots (Cave's style, Mushihimesama, Progear & Espgaluda do this) or making player shots much darker than the enemy's (Touhou series games do this). Score Rush's player shots have a lot of bright white in them, so regardless of what colour you select for the bullets, it can sometimes be a bit disorienting!

The way it is now, I find that if I'm playing a Normal mode match with a Guest or a beginner player, that I end up carrying the team and they get little playtime if they die early (I usually suicide if it's just me left really early on) and I'm worried that might scare away some newbies to the game.

How do enemy spawns during boss fights work? Randomly pop up, fixed enemies show up at intervals when the boss is at certain health values? I actually find a number of bosses hardest due to how the enemies spawn and you can't kill them quickly enough (solo on Godlike usually) before they fire a volley of shots forcing you to make a wide movement, or eat a bullet wall.

Scoring being affected by kill speed multiplier means that the highest scores would be attainable only with 4 players I guess (and thus the increased firepower)?

Presumably Turbulenz bought Score Rush to monetize it; no idea how easy it is to do, but you could always sell different ship 'skins' to use (don't even have to change how they function, purely to look cool). It'd also sell itself to an extent as people would instantly be jealous and all "HOW U GET THAT SHIP" whenever they join a game. (I wouldn't be surprised if this is already in the works.)